This link goes to a “call for papers” for an upcoming conference at Yale in April of next year (or click on title below). The announcement appears on a webpage by Rene Almeling, who appears to be one of the two organizers of the conference:
Rene Almeling
Professor of Sociology, Public Health, History of Medicine, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Yale UniversitySarah S. Richardson
Aramont Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Harvard University
The conference is designed to lead to the publication scientific papers dealing (probably not kindly) with “gametocentric sex”.
Here’s the gist of the announcement (bolding is mine)
Inspired by rapidly emerging developments in the science and politics of fertility and by the rise of gametocentric definitions of sex, as well as a decades-long tradition of gender scholarship about gametes in relation to sex, race, sexuality, and health, we invite contributions to a workshop for early-career researchers in the social sciences and humanities who are developing the next generation of scholarship about eggs and sperm. Our aim is to provide mentorship for further development of works-in-progress, either in the form of dissertation chapters or publishable articles.
We invite proposals from early-career researchers – e.g. graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, assistant professors – in the social sciences and humanities as well as interdisciplinary scholars in the health and life sciences who are studying any aspect of eggs and sperm. We are especially interested in creative and innovative theoretical and/or methodological approaches, and we intend for the topic of “gametic politics” to be understood broadly. Potential topics might include (but are definitely not limited to):
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analyses of how gametes have figured into historical and contemporary definitions of sex;
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the politicization of gametes across multiple domains, such as medicine, education, sports, and law;
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the intersection of gametic politics with myriad forms of inequality, such as those associated with gender, race, class, and sexuality;
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how various scientific approaches to gametes are mobilized in political discourse;
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individual experiences of and beliefs about gametes, including in relation to one’s gender identity;
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the emergence of gametic metaphors and their implications for science and society.
As the first bit notes, the whole affair was inspired by “gametocentric definitions of sex,” which of course are not definitions but actually “concepts”, in the same way that the “biological species concept” (BSC) is not an a priori definition of species, but a recognition and encapsulation in words of a biologically observed near-universal. The BSC arose because it has been recognized forever that nature is not a “spectrum of animals and plants”: there’s no continuum between blackbirds, parrots and falcons. Or between clover, white oak trees, and poison ivy. Rather, nature is “lumpy”, with different nearly discrete groups that we call “species”. To understand how a continuous evolutionary process leads to a nature that is “lumpy,” the BSC arose to recognize that the “lumps” are maintained by reproductive isolating barriers that impede gene flow between nature’s “lumps.”. As Allen Orr and I wrote in the first chapter of our book Speciation, the BSC immediately gives us a research program for understanding the origing of species (those “lumps”): find out how the reproductive isolating barriers arise. The BSC arose because it not only recognized a near-universal in biology (such near-universals are rare), but also was utilitarian, explaining the origin of the lumps. This is why Darwin, who didn’t have a good definition of species, was unable to understand the origin of species, despite the title of his great 1859 book. It should have been called The Origin of Adaptations instead.
Likewise, it was recognized over a century ago that all animals and vascular plants (with a few exceptions caused by developmental anomalies) come in two flavors, male and female, and these differ because the former have small mobile gametes and the latter large immobile ones. I’d prefer saying “the gametocentric CONCEPT of sex,” for the gamete-size concept holds in all these organisms, and no other concept of sex holds across all those species. So again we have a concept to deal with something nearly universal in nature that, as a bonus, helps us understand evolution.
Of course I know little about the genesis of this seminar, nor read the papers of the organizers, but the stuff in bold leads me to believe that this symposium seeks to overturn the “gametocentric definition of sex” because it is seen as oppressive to those who feel that they are not really members of the sex recognized by their gametes.
Unfortunately, holding any other view of biological sex not only makes the recognized binary not universal, but also effaces our ability to understand evolutionarily important phenomena like sexual selection. Like the BSC, the gametocentric species concept is utilitarian as well as nearly universal. To those benighted individuals who say that biological sex is really a complex mixture of various traits, including “lived experience” and “one’s psychological self concept”, I’d ask, “Well, how many biological sexes are there in humans? An infinite number?” Is that true of foxes, ducks, and iguanas, too?” Remember that three biological societies declared that sex was a spectrum in all species, but then took down that declaration because a lot of biologists opposed it. In fact, in later correspondence the three societies admitted that their initial declaration was misleading–and conceded a lot of our points.
As I’ve said repeatedly, the binary concept of biological sex is the only one that makes sense, but it says nothing about people’s feelings about what gender they really are, doesn’t justify our mistreating people who feel neither male nor female (or feel they’re not members of their natal sex), and is certainly not transphobic. Recognizing that helps explain why, over and over again—probably a dozen times—natural selection has led to the evolution of two sexes—and each time the same gametic distinction is the result. Understanding why there are only two sexes coming from these independent origins is another question answered only by recognizing the sex binary. As Ronald Fisher wrote in his magesterial The Gentical Theory of Natural Selection:
No practical biologist interested in sexual reproduction would be led to work out the detailed consequences experienced by organisms having three or more sexes, yet what else should he do if he wishes to understand why the sexes are, in fact, always two? (pp. ix of 1958 Dover edition)
Now I may be defending something that this conference actually accepts, but I’m guessing from the announcement that the purpose is to show that the sex binary is oppressive because not everybody feels “male” or “female”. And if that’s the case, we have another example of ideology trying to erode scientific knowledge in the name of social justice.
We shall see next year. In the meantime, I’ll continue to defend the binary concept of sex based on gamete size and mobility.
Yes, I think you are right to be suspicious of the goal here.
The rise of gametocentric definitions of sex? Sounds like they are positioning this as a new thing, one they clearly want to refute. And the fact that this is a call for papers from people in the Humanities and Social Sciences is revealing as well.
There, Jerry, fixed it for you! 😉
I used “social justice” ironically, but your change is better.
Perhaps a better title would be…
Gametic Politics:
Eggs, Sperm, and Gender/Sex in the 21st Century West
Marxists practice “alchemy of the word” (Marcuse, referring to art), to create the illusion of a secret, hidden knowledge that even brainiac scientists are clueless about – “come with us“, it says to mid-wit initiates.
I am reminded of Noam Chomsky (of all people!) clearly illustrating what I’d call science envy in a video out there… lemmee find it…. I was going to put it up on the great “truth” post, but this’ll be fine…
Found it:
https://youtu.be/OzrHwDOlTt8?si=GN1itZRcHjtWZGT9
… make sense? Gnosticism, Marxism, envy, cargo-cult science (Feynman)….
In the 1980’s/90’s the late Hugh H. Iltis (Dept. of Botany, UW-Madison) called it: test tube envy.
😆
I love it!
I’m not sure the comparison between sex and species is totally apt here. If we consider all creatures that ever lived across time as well as space, there is indeed a continuum of species such as blackbirds and parrots. By imperceptible degrees, the ancient common ancestor that lived however many millions of years ago split into lineages, one of which ultimately produced blackbirds and the other of which produced parrots. If we consider all animals, past as well as present, there is no binary distinction between blackbirds and parrots.
There is an analogy between evolution of species and evolution of languages. Everyone knows that old Latin evolved into a number of languages, the so called “Romance” languages. Many years ago I read a linguistic analysis of an ancient manuscript found in Andalusia that dated to about 750 AD. That dialect was very interesting. But it annoyed me that the two linguists who coauthored the paper wasted long paragraphs quibbling over the somewhat meaningless question of whether we should categorize that ancient language as very late Latin or very early Spanish. For goodness sake! Who cares which we call it? By definition intermediate forms are INTERMEDIATE. That dialect is its own unique interesting thing, so let’s study it and understand it.
In the same way, I wonder if it is useful for evolutionary biologists to spend too much time quibbling about whether a hominid fossil should be categorized as very late Homo habilis or very early Homo erectus or what have you.
Give me two extant clearly distinct living species and, if I’m allowed to survey all creatures that ever lived, I will show you a smooth continuum. The same cannot be said for male/female gametes unless we go back over a billion years ago to the origin of isogamy in very primitive ancestors of multicellular organisms.
I think you misunderstand. The question is why AT A GIVEN TIME, nature is lumpy. That is the question.. You notice I did make reference to a continual evoutionary process, which takes into account what you said.
Right. I must have read too hastily and it didn’t really register that you had addressed my point.
That isn’t a bad point about a finer detail of the analogy, since it makes one pause and think, but the theory about how sex evolved toward isogamy (that being a binary of big and small gametes) would allow there to be a period where various intermediate gamete sizes were tried out but then selected against. This would be a bit like intermediates between species. We don’t know this to be the case, of course, but that would be the hypothesized.
I think that given their first bullet point:
… means that one could submit a short lesson on just that – give a history lesson on the discovery of biological sex, going back to ancient Egyptians for example ( https://fairerdisputations.org/the-british-invasion/ ) and moving on thru the centuries: https://fairerdisputations.org/the-british-invasion/
This would include a description about why two sexes seemed to have evolved, that being about the disruptive selection theory: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.3656
Needless to say, we of the trans-creature community are about to organize our own academic get-together. We will of course delve into the intersection of species politics with myriad forms of inequality, such as the systemic oppression of prey by predator; and explore individual experiences of and beliefs about species, including in relation to one’s species identity. We will also interrogate the oppressive political implications of designating the plants and animals as “kingdoms”—instead of portraying them as two equal and inclusive programs within the continuous spectrum of self-actualization.
“Gametic oppression”
I think you hit the jackpot!! A quick web search using Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo finds no other uses of this phrase. It has legs. It resonates. Given that much of academia in the social sciences and humanities is about trying to invent the next fashionable phrase and then reaping the reward in your citation stats and conference invitations, you might have a second life as a scholar!
What about the “heliocentric oppression” that Copernicus wielded against the Church? Perhaps these social scientists should have a conference on that oppression too. After all, in postmodernism there are no objective truths, only beliefs and most of all feelings.
Someone needs to do a spoof on “gametic oppression” along the lines of Monty Python’s “Help! I’m being repressed” sketch.
The set of “early-career researchers in the social sciences and humanities who are developing the next generation of scholarship about eggs and sperm” is empty.
I just can’t take any of this seriously, and I’m grateful to our host for trying to do so. The symposium is just make-work for sociologists. Or rage-bait for evolutionary biologists. Or perhaps both, who knows.
They are not even speaking the same language as evolutionary biologists. For example, Mark points us to the excellent theory of disruptive selection leading to two gamete sizes within each species. But when Almeling & Richardson call for “creative and innovative theoretical…approaches” they don’t mean anything that Parker, Bell, Charlesworth, or Maynard Smith would recognize as theory. Instead they mean the kind of hermeneutical alchemy that Bryan helpfully points us to.
Sometimes symposia have workshops. Maybe this one should have a bunch of microscopes and marine animals on display, things with small translucent bodies through which one can see the gonads and the gametes. No guessing about sex assigned at birth for these animals. Maybe seeing gonads and gametes would help sociologists recognize the continuity across animal species (including humans) of sex and the sex binary and sex differences? Possibly I give them too much credit for open-mindedness.
This is absolutely make-work.
There seems to be three categories of people here. The first category is the general population, who can easily tell you the practical difference between a man and a woman. The second category are actual scientists, who can explain on a biological level the difference between a man and a woman.
The third category are the mid-wits, those that are (to paraphrase Medawar) educated beyond their ability to think. These are the ones that have turned a question with an obvious answer (i.e. “what is a woman?”) into a conundrum/meal ticket that one could devote an entire “studies” department to.
The mid-wits do this because they aren’t capable of rigorous scientific work, but don’t want to go out there and get a real job, so they have to find stuff do to within the academy. They are a lot like theologians in this sense.
That third group does it for one main reason: there are people who, for whatever reason, dislike being their sex — and they insist that when they are correctly sexed they are in agony, feeling completely devastated and devalued. Those you call mid-wits would never have dreamed of denying the “gametic definition of sex” and going through this whole bizarre pseudoscientific rigamarole of the past few years if the trans-identified had expressed their desires as a preference, but no big deal if they don’t get it.
The fact that, had this been true, the “science” would not have gone down the path it’s currently struggling to go down is a strong clue that the entire project has nothing to do with science. It’s motivated by pity towards other people, not curiosity about how the world works.
Beautifully said (as usual.)
Exactly. And thanks to them the entire population must put up with this. It’s poisoned some discourse: it’s now required that one refer to “pregnant people” and “people with cervixes” and so on. This garbage is now everywhere.
But, contained in this “pity” are lies upon lies. People who point out these lies are demonized, sometimes their careers are destroyed.
And, at the end of the day, is engaging in these distortions about sex actually helping the very small number of people who truly dislike being their sex? It is certainly possible to be compassionate without lying about what is a man and what is a woman.
So I slightly disagree about the motives of these folks. Their behavior is so execrable that it seems hard (for me at least) to locate any pity in what they do.
“Inspired by… the rise of gametocentric definitions of sex… .” The organizers frame this as if they are coming together to push back on a recently emerging threat when, in fact, the gamete binary has been central to organismal and evolutionary biology for generations. At the end of the day—and at the end of the symposium—it will still be so.
Thank you. You hit the nail on the head.
Well, it is actually very recent when one looks at the whole arc of history. People had been sorting themselves (and animals) into men/male and women/female for many thousands of years before anyone realized that they could be differentiated most clearly by gamete size and mobility.
The differentiation is by body plan organized to make (now, in the future, or in the past) numerous small motile excreted gametes or few large ones that travel only a few inches not under their own power. Even before gametes were discovered, it was obvious that semen had a lot to do with procreation, and semen came only from the people with penises, whom people without penises were keen to let inside them (or not) with the expectation that offspring would result.
This is the answer to the trans activists who say, correctly, that they don’t know for sure what gametes they make because they’ve never seen them but then, incorrectly, argue that they don’t know what sex they are. It’s the body plan, Jake. It’s so highly correlated with gametes that it works as a useful proxy. A person who knows only that she has a vagina and wants children learns that if she finds a willing person with a penis and testicles, pregnancy is not guaranteed, but it is far more likely than if she finds only a person without them. Further, the likelihood that a clothed person will have, or not have, the sexual body plan you’re looking for is so strongly predictable from general visible body habitus that you can sexually pursue with confidence even without ever personally confirming that body plan until after the marriage vows. Imagine that! (It’s possible that those individuals with androgynously ambiguous clothed bodies or non-binary personalities are not sexually attractive to those looking for progeny and so are simply overlooked and irrelevant to gamete combination.)
Exactly, people have sorted according to various features of the body plan for millennia, the gametic distinction came very recently.
He nails it. This is why anyone of normal intelligence above the age of 3 can tell you the difference between a man and a women. There are obvious body plan differences that highly correlate with what gametes are produced.
“Unfortunately, holding any other view of biological sex not only makes the recognized binary not universal, but also effaces our ability to understand evolutionarily important phenomena like sexual selection”
The following are the, doubtless muddled, thoughts of a non-scientist:
How could it possibly make sense to define sex other than by reproductive role (which, across species, comes down to gametes)? Why does sex even exist? Reproduction. What separates life from non-life? Reproduction (and maybe some other stuff.) How does natural selection work in sexual species? It involves reproduction at both ends: Beginning, (mutations in genes that are carried in the gametes that fuse to form a new individual,) and End, (which of the new individuals have more offspring before they die.)
I’ve been wondering about this for a while now: would it make sense to address this gobbledegook as a new form of evolution denial?
Evolution is clearly oppressive and so must be condemned and deconstructed. Like, it even has something to do with eugenics, and race, and IQ, and competition; the list of horrors goes on and on.
I’m not terribly fondly remembering an individual from some twenty years back (height of New Atheism & Creationism internet fights; she fought for New Atheism and Evolution) insisting that intelligence isn’t inherited, since intelligence being inheritable was ideologically unthinkable.
I’d like to say that I was clever and asking her how intelligence evolved if it isn’t an inheritable trait, or did she opt to switch to the creationist side of the internet, but as they say, wit is the clever response you come up with after everyone has already left the room.
But at least you’ll be much better prepared when/if something similar happens again.
Yes it would for sure make sense to critique this as evolution denial. Or a kind of human exceptionalism.
Can also contribute to the second question. Sex exists for recombination, not specifically for reproduction (contra the old song, you can in fact have one without the other, but not in humans or other mammals where they always go together like a horse & carriage).
We are diploid animals (with two copies of the genome in most of our cells), and we want our offspring to be diploid like us. That means to get recombination in those offspring each of us can only put half of our genetic material into each offspring. To do that we have to throw our genome in with another individual (carefully chosen of course) and one of her genomes. That can necessarily work only if exactly two gametes (each with one genome) combine to make offspring.
Downstream of that is the disruptive selection that Mark alluded to upthread. It’s good to make big gametes and to make many gametes; resources are limited; an evolutionarily stable solution to that tradeoff is a compromise in which some individuals make many small gametes (males) and other individuals make few large gametes (females).
By the way, can you recommend books or papers that deal with the apparent paradox of sexual reproduction?
meaning, you pay a steep cost by accepting to pass on only half of your genes.
I know there are proposed solutions (dna repair, variance, etc) but has this ever been sufficiently “settled” similarly to anisogamy?
Only half of your genes are better than average fitness. Mate often enough and at least some of your offspring will get more of the good ones from both parents. The progeny who get the bad ones don’t matter to you the better endowed because they won’t find mates, leaving more good mates for you. From your point of view as a gene, all that matters is that you get passed on, and your chances are improved if you get hooked up with a better than average set of genes from another individual. Failing that, to have Sydney Sweeney slip into a pair of you would be OK.
It certainly makes more sense to address gender ideology as evolution denial than the converse – that believing there are only two sexes is evolution denial. I’ve seen that second argument from people who seem to reason:
1.) Creationists see living things as units so discrete that they have trouble viewing life as a continuum. Like comes only from like; you’re either one or the other. To them, there are apes and then there are humans: humans therefore could not have an ape as a distant ancestor. Evolution denial.
2.) Believing there are only two sexes is the same mistake about life as creationism: you’re either one or the other. That makes it a form of creationism and a denial of evolution.
This argument only makes sense if you squint hard, think loose, and focus at the same time on the fact that creationists are against gay rights.
Wow! Insisting on the sex binary is a form of creationism and evolution denial. I’ll be damned. Thanks for explaining that. I hope our host sees this and gives it some thought – this brings WEIT full circle (or at least full horseshoe).
I’ve been going back through my Substacks trying to find where I read this first but the claim has been made that the Left doesn’t really believe in evolution/natural selection anymore. Genes are racist if they exist in people (they do) and if everyone doesn’t have the same ones (they don’t.) The Left can’t come right out and say that because it sounds like creationism, which is Right-redneck-racist coded. It seems they are adopting a Lysenkoist/Lamarckian blank-slate view that sufficient environmental pressure can produce any desired outcome of sex and intelligence in not only the individual but in “their” progeny as well.
“[T]he whole affair was inspired by “gametocentric definitions of sex,” which of course are not definitions but actually “concepts”, in the same way that the “biological species concept” (BSC) is not an a priori definition of species, but a recognition and encapsulation in words of a biologically observed near-universal.” – J. Coyne
A concept can be regarded as “a way of thinking of some thing or things” (E. J. Lowe) that is verbally expressed by a definition. To use the BSC definition of a species as “members of populations that actually or potentially interbreed in nature, not according to similarity of appearance”(* is to think of species in a certain way; and this way of thinking (concept) of species is empirically well-informed and theoretically most fruitful. So too are the ways of thinking (concepts) of males as sperm producers and of females as egg producers.
(* https://evolution.berkeley.edu/biological-species-concept/)
Gametic politics? Gametocentric definitions of sex? This sounds like the secret languages that children invent in kindergarten or preschool so that adults cannot understand them.
On the other hand, this “newspeak” does not surprise me much. University professors, researchers and experts in the field of intersectionality and identity politics are almost always at the forefront when it comes to adapting reality to their ideology by means of linguistic redefinitions and reinterpretations.
While offenders today are not exclusively women, overall this kind of thing is the result of midwit women flooding into colleges and universities over the last few decades, the vast majority of them ending up in junk academia — as private universities, Harvard and Yale can employ faculty in these junk academic fields if they want, but I don’t think taxpayers who fund public schools should have to pay for this kind of nonsense.
Rubbish.
While the commenter may have exaggerated the role of women here, PCC recently posted a talk by behavioral scientist Cory Clark which he heard when he attended the USC “Censorship in the Sciences” conference. Titled “From Worriers to Warriors: the Rise of Women in Science and Society,” she suggests something similar:
https://youtu.be/-liIioemFdQ?si=Sv-a4kHptoP-eaLt
Great minds think alike etc.
People underestimate and are reflexively afraid to acknowledge how disastrous devolution of the complementary roles of men and women and growing female influence have been for society — men and women are just not the same: their brains are anatomically and functionally different, and they do not react the same way to social conditions and stimuli — male corrective behavior is absent, replaced by a victimhood hierarchy.
Some of the numbers are alarming: whereas in 1970 men outnumbered women in law school 10:1, there are now 25% more women — soon over 60% of college grads will be women, the vast majority with junk academic degrees of dubious usefulness — because women normally marry ‘up’, meaning they choose a man with greater SES, many of these women will not find suitable marriage partners, and marriage rates will fall further and childlessness will rise.
But we’ll have plenty of seminars and papers about gender nonsense.
Not rubbish.
Well, how utterly shocking, Leslie MacMillan sticking up for unadulterated mysogyny.
Dr M and I have opposing views on some feminist issues, but there’s no hatred. Play the ball, not the man.
Off topic, but this is why I prefer hockey over soccer: You always play the man, never play the puck.
Can’t wait to see them insist sperm can become eggs with the injection of synthetic hormones!